Patience – Oh, no, it wasn’t like that at all.  But I can see your side of things.  It’s less about the order of events and more about my – your – perception of it.  I don’t much care for numbers, or solvable things, but I do like to understand why someone does what they do.  Myself included.  And I’m never really sure, but I try to understand.  And myself included there, too.

Harmony – It’s funny how Dad always wanted to answer for everything.  Or not an answer, but the answer.  The pure essence of what an answer could be, distilled into as few words as possible.  Whatever it was needed to be exactly explained, its circumference perfectly circumscribed, or else it was all nothing.  I know I must have driven him mad.

Patience – Until –

Harmony – Until Mum died.  Of course.  Obviously.  He’s changed.  So much.  He talks to me now with these big sad eyes, blue eyes, and he looks so down, even when he’s happy, and even when things are good, and I just don’t know what to say.

Patience – For him, it was a permanent darkening.

Harmony – He told me once that all of the colour had leeched out of everything, and that music no longer made sense to him, as though he couldn’t connect the beat to the rhythm, and that all food was like dust.  He would never have said anything like that ten years ago.

Patience – I never felt like that.  Never.  I was sad.  Of course.  Obviously.  But I never.  I think perhaps that we are primed from birth to expect that our parents will die, that they’ll go first.  They have to be pushed aside to make room for us, their children.  That’s why they had us in the first place.  And we know they need to make space.  It’s suffocating, when they aren’t dead.  Sometimes.

Harmony – I have a little yellow scarf that she gave me.  I don’t wear it.  It’s somewhere.  Somewhere.  I don’t know.  I’m pretty sure I never threw it out.  And he asked about it, not two weeks ago, asked me if I had it and knew where it was.

Part of the Railroad Perfection series